[News] Patents Raise Antitrust Questions

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Patent Thickets, Bad Patents, and Costly Patent Litigation:
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| In my next (and final) post on the sewing machine patent thicket, I will
| raise an issue that is not yet discussed in my paper — antitrust. The impact
| of antitrust doctrine on how patent-owners contract with other patent-owners
| may create significant variances between the nineteenth century and today on
| how patent-owners may resolve patent thickets. I am still researching the
| relationship between patent pools and antitrust, and so I am especially keen
| on receiving feedback from the readers of this series.
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http://volokh.com/posts/1241494415.shtml
Don't tailor make patent act
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| Congress has spent the past five years in an ongoing effort to reform the
| patent system. Reform proposals have come and gone; the debates between
| proponents and opponents of various amendments have been fierce and
| protracted.
|
| [..]
|
| These disagreements demonstrate the conflicting needs of different industries
| in the patent system. The incentives necessary to promote innovation in the
| pharmaceutical industry are not necessarily those for software or to
| semiconductors. The incentives necessary to innovation by small entities may
| differ from those needed by large entities.
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http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202430534638&Dont_tailor_make_patent_act&slreturn=1
Recent:
FTC Asks Supreme Court to Review Rambus Antitrust Case
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| The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to
| intervene in a case in which the agency accused memory-maker Rambus of
| anticompetitive behavior in deceiving a standards-setting body.
|
| The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in April threw
| out the FTC's case against Rambus, in which the agency accused the company of
| convincing industry groups to declare a standard for the memory used in PCs,
| servers, printers and cameras without admitting that it owned the patents to
| those technologies. The FTC Monday asked the Supreme Court to overturn that
| appellate decision.
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http://www.pcworld.com/article/154435/.html?tk=rss_news
An afternoon among the patent lawyers
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| There was a brief discussion of the practice of not researching patents at
| all with the hope of avoiding triple damages for "willful infringement." The
| participants agreed that this was a dangerous approach which could backfire
| on its practitioners; convincing a judge of one's ignorance can be a
| challenge. But it was also acknowledged that there is no way to do a full
| search for patents which might be infringed by a given program in any case.
|
| All told, it was a more interesting afternoon than one might expect. The
| discussion of software patents in the free software community tends to follow
| familiar lines; the people at this event see the issue differently. For
| better or worse, their view likely has a lot of relevance to how things will
| go. There will be some tweaking of the system to try to avoid the worst
| abuses - at least as seen by some parts of the industry - but wholesale
| patent reform is not on the agenda. Software patents will be with us (in the
| US) for the foreseeable future, and they will continue to loom over the rest
| of the world. We would be well advised to have our defenses in place.
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http://lwn.net/Articles/324675/
Innovation in the 21st Century: Harnessing the Power of Intellectual Property
and Antitrust Law
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| Patents Blocking Antitrust Action: Carrier suggests that the existence of IP
| rights should not grant a company a free-pass to take otherwise
| anticompetitive actions. In his post, Prof. Phil Weiser (Colorado)
| agrees “IPRs should not displace antitrust oversight.” Weiser argues that
| this is especially true in the area of software patents: “Given that software
| patents are controversial to begin with, awarding the recipient of a patent
| on an application programming interface or communications protocol a
| get-out-jail free card is hard to justify.”
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http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2009/03/innovation-in-the-21st-century-harnessing-the-power-of-intellectual-property-and-antitrust-law.html
CSIRO takes HP to cleaners over Wi-Fi patent - next!
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| The largest IT company in the world, Hewlett-Packard, has been humbled by
| Australia's national science agency CSIRO and agreed to settle for an
| undisclosed sum over a long running Wi-Fi patent infringement suit. The win
| against the Silicon Valley colossus has given CSIRO ammunition to continue
| pursuing 13 other technology giants for millions of dollars in licensing
| fees.
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http://www.itwire.com/content/view/24224/1023/
FFII and EPO announce "Binaries-As-Prior-Art"
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| After years of confidential work, the European Patent Office (EPO) and the
| Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) today announce a
| radical way to improve software patent quality: Binaries-As-Prior-Art, or
| BAPA. BAPA combines a database of billions of compiled computer programs
| ("binaries") with a powerful Cloud search engine that can find any invention
| in microseconds.
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http://press.ffii.org/Press_releases/FFII_and_EPO_announce_%22Binaries-As-Prior-Art%22
Ciaran O'Riordan (LP09)
http://groups.fsf.org/index.php/Ciaran_O'Riordan_(LP09)
Ciaran O'Riordan: End Software Patents
http://ciaran.compsoc.com/esp-boston-2009.html
Software Patents and Open-Source
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| Does our current system of patents, especially software patents, "promote the
| progress of science and the useful arts?" The answer is obvious. It does not.
| Is it obvious enough for the Supreme Court to go against the wishes of
| the "intellectual property nomenklatura" of this country, with their
| fictitious billions of dollars on their balance sheets? Maybe. We'll see.
| Another interesting question is this. On the day after all those patents are
| invalidated, what will the stock market do? It will be interesting to see....
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http://xoatlicue.blogspot.com/2009/02/software-patents-and-open-source.html
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